Maybe...but then again, one could argue that Shakespeare synthesized new plays from material that was available then; from what I've seen from at least some of the sources for some of his plays, there are enough differences between what Shakespeare wrote as a play, and what the sources Shakespeare probably used actually said, that Shakespeare's stuff comes across as mostly original and unique.
Music has a similar problem: yes, musicians can borrow either theme or sample from an existing work (or body of works), but generally their new syntheses of those themes and samples turn out to be different and unique from the original source(s).
I do think it's a difference in mentality between artists and OSS, but I think it's less to do with artists not having their own 'open soucre community' and more to do with them not realizing the benefits of doing things for free.:-)
Advertising, being one of the biggies: I'm sure there are more than a few 'starving' artists who would not be 'starving' if people saw their work...but, if the galleries in the artists' city don't display their work for whatever reason, what are the artists to do?
Alternatively, if those same 'starving' artists did some original artwork for a OSS game or two, their work would be more visible quicker than if they waited for some gallery to display their work. True, the artists might not hit the right audience, but they would be more likely to hit any audience...
(Besides, the artists-in-question might find they like drawing dragons and gun-toting demons more than they like drawing portraits and bowls of fruit.:-) )
Same goes for music. Yes, you aren't going to be monetarily compensated for the work created for OSS (at least, not typically); on the other hand, you get increased visibility and potentially new legions of fans and word of mouth...:-) Fair trade, I think.
And advertising's just one example; there are a lot of things you could do within a trade/barter system. Money is not the only way to pay for things; maybe an OSS game programmer/designer could offer the artist computings services (website design, e-mail account, server space, etc.) in exchange for some original artwork for the programmer's game. That stuff is useful, and doesn't come cheap. Again, I would think that's a fair trade...
OSS needs to do a better job of playing up the values of 'free as in beer'.:-)
I do not think that is so true. There are a few independant groups which make wildly popular games. eg Doom, snood, various other 'indies'. Over the last few years the indie game scene has really taken off. I think these people make games for a lot of people not into the mainstream games.
Yeah, but wildly popular in terms of those who have access to the 'Net, and know where to look. How many indie games do you see sold in mainstream stores (like the big retailers) or even specialty stores (like EB or Gamestop)?
Most, if not all, of the games stocking the shelves are from established publishers, or from large corporations (primarily, Microsoft, but once upon a time, IBM did sell games); until indie games can be picked up with some frequency at some place like Target or EB, I don't think indie games will be able to assume a 'mainstream' presence, and I think this is what Mr. Crawford was talking about: making the smaller games more visible at retail level.
Using movies as an example, big studios do distribute smaller, more experimental films; there are also new studios which are willing to take a chance (IFC Films springs immediately to mind). The situation in video games is not the same: either a large publisher is publishing your game, or your game gets buried in a 'shovelware' pack.
Without a big game studio behind an indie game, I don't think the good indie games are going to get the kind of exposure that, say, an indie film or indie music group/album would get. You have whole channels devoted to promoting new, not necessarily mainstream music (MTV2 springs to mind) and new, not necessarily mainsteam film (IFC and Sundance, for example); in the gaming world, you're limited to something like G4...which will only talk to you if you're a big studio or a console developer (at least, I haven't seen a game from, say, Garage Games or Matrix Games on that channel yet). And I think there is enough of a game-playing public which doesn't log onto the Internet religiously which will miss out on the indie game scene, unless they somehow find out where to look for indie titles...
And if a big studio's PR/marketing efforts got behind some kind of clearinghouse for indie titles or some kind of collective of smaller game studios, I think that the gaming public-at-large would have a much better idea of where to start looking for indie games...as well as improving visibility on the retail level.
This is funny: EGM got a group of kids together and introduced them to some of the more "classic" games. End result: they weren't impressed...
On the positive side, they all agreed ET was pretty much crap; on the negative side, all the other games (with the exception of Electronic Football) were on the 'classic' list at costik.com.
Yeah, magic in CRPGs tends to be underwhelming at best (except as buffing or fire support for your front-line fighters...).
I always liked the idea of being able to make a spell more or less difficult to cast, depending on how powerful the spell was; i.e., if you trying to do 6d of damage on a 3d spell, that would be more difficult...or if you were trying to do 1d of damage on the same 3d spell that would be less difficult. I think you can do that in GURPS; I can't think of any computer games at the moment that allow you to do this.
At least, it provides a rationale for wanting to put more points into skill with a spell: you'd want to research the spell more to make it easier to do on-the-fly substitutions in the future (making it a little easier to tackle the giant with 20d of hit dice...).
(That said, IIRC, D&D 3e allows a spell caster to do this with 'feats'; I'm not sure which of the games based on the D&D 3e ruleset allow those feats to appear in the game. D&D 3e also allows 'feats' to switch energy types when casting spells; if a spell uses fire to power it, a caster could get a 'feat' which allows that caster to substitute acid or even sound instead. I think that's a cool concept, that makes sense; the caster's learned a different version of the same spell.)
*sigh* I wish some designer would bite the bullet, and code the Ars Magica magic system; it at least assumes that a lot of the spellcasting a mage will do will be ad hoc...
Beyond Zork is an example of IF that blurs the line between RPG and text adventure, at least somewhat. You get stats, you get combat, the stats have an effect on your interactions with the story, and you get the benefits of interactive fiction: a text parser, multiple solutions to at least some of the problems you encounter in the story (at least some of which tend to be non-violent), and fairly descriptive and well-written text descriptions. I'm sure there might be others, but this game immediately springs to mind...
I agree that most IF isn't really interactive; even the interactive fiction of Infocom (maker of Beyond Zork) wasn't all that interactive. That said, would games from Looking Glass (Ultima Underworld, Thief, System Shock) qualify as IF? (I guess you could put Deus Ex in their as well; I've never played it though...) You get a graphical description of your worldview rather than a textual description, but you can have a rather significant impact on the environment through your actions...
And would they blur the line between IF and RPG? System Shock 2 allows a player a great deal of interaction with the environment, and you do have to deal with a collection of stats and skills that will have an effect on what you can or can't do in the game...
(Same can be said of Ultima Underworld; not sure about Thief...)
I think, to a large extent, you can't really compare the modern narrative structure to the structure employed in telling or playing an RPG; it is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Yes, the standard literary tools can help to advance an RPG campaign; however, one of the differences of the RPG versus a traditional narrative is that the RPG's story is not predetermined; the traditional narrative is. Also, the idea that the characters of an RPG's story will have an effect on the story is something that is foreign to most traditional narratives (storytelling to an audience may allow for some improvisation depending on the audience, but generally you don't see a lot of improvisation in the traditional narrative structure). I think the idea of a traditional narrative character advancing in a subtle, gradual way over the course of a story is something that would be difficult to achieve in all but the longest of RPG story's; changes in RPG characters need to happen fairly regularly, they need to be noticeable, and they need to take in account a often compressed timeframe for the story (whereas a traditional narrative story may take months or years to complete in the story, in a typical one-shot RPG story you're talking about days, maybe weeks).
I'm not making a value judgement about the superiority of traditional narrative vs. RPG; I'm just pointing out the difficulty in using the hallmarks of a successful story in one as a model for a successful example of the other.
I think for an RPG story to be successful there has to some form of interactivity present for the characters, especially in the form of allowing the characters to have a noticeable impact on the story. A lot of CRPG designers have taken interactivity to mean allowing a player to interact with their story in terms of combat, that may or may not have an effect on future combats in the game; as far as having an effect on the story, most player interaction tends to be superficial at best (scripted conversations being a perfect example; other than getting snippets of information if you talk to certain characters in the right order, what effect do these really have on the game?). I think most of the dissatisfaction with CRPGs stems from this disconnect: the interaction in a CRPG pales alongside the interaction potentially offered in a RPG.
(Yeah, I'm sure many of us who've played RPGs for some time have experienced the GM who thinks that either combat is the main interactive element of the story, or that player interaction is solely limited to the choices that the GM might make in terms of their story...:-) )
The designers have to put more work in to expanding the definiton of their settings to allow different players to different things (even if it is ultimately from a limited number of choices) that can have an effect on how the story will unfold. What's a little sad about all this is that the pen-and-paper RPGs have at least some component for dealing with non-combat activities in adventures; I think the designers don't tend to implement the non-combat portions, though.
(In some instances, the designers don't completely implement the combat portions of RPG engines, either. I'll use D&D as an example: D&D has a fairly extensive ruleset for psionics; I can only think of one D&D game (I believe it was a Dark Sun game) that had any kind of psionic component to it). D&D 3e has 'feats' which allow characters to bend the rules to their advantage in certain areas; I have yet to see a game based on the D&D 3e ruleset which has a full implementation of the 'feats' system. Vehicle combat isn't touched in most games, but there are rules for it. Leadership rarely comes into play in many games, even though many CRPGs have fairly large mass combats involving a lot of different allies. These are just some examples; I'm sure I've missed some.)
(Not to mention, there are other RPG engines out there, besides D&D: Storyteller, GURPS, Fuzion, FUDGE, various diceless systems, etc. Designers have tended to use either s
Funny: there was a point in Ultima Underworld I where you had to run around the dungeon collecting ingredients for a stew; I always thought that was a little quirky.:-)
Seriously though, if you were making a game in which the PCs were trolls or giants or ogres, I would think cooking would be a good skill to have and develop. If nothing else, such a game should give you prestige, reputation, or experience, if you can come up with new and ingenious methods to create dishes of your enemies.
(And you have to make provisions for food preparation as well; plating is really important in RL, and I imagine that at least some giants or ogres or trolls might feel the same about their food...:-) )
An Iron Chef CRPG with Chairman Kaga as a troll...imagine the ingredient list.;-)
What Firaxis will probably end up doing is developing sequels (Civ III) or sequel-like games (Alpha Centauri; in a lot of ways, this plays and feels like a highly polished, more flexible version of Civ II) as a means of guaranteeing a steady cash income while they develop more unique titles (Gettysburg, Antietam, SimGolf); if Pirates! allows Sid to finish his dinosaur game (the one he was working on before Civ III), I don't have a problem picking up a copy of Pirates!...*grin*
(And I would love to see an updated version of Sword of the Samurai; no it's not a Sid Meier game, but his name is in the credits, so why can't he remake it? *grin*)
tigermonkey
P.S. One wonders why Sid allowed RRII to be made by someone else; I think PopTop did a great job (I still have the game on my hard dirve, and play it every now and then), but I have to wonder what kind of financial windfall Sid would have reaped if Firaxis would have released "Sid Meyer's Railroad Tycoon II".
I like System Shock 2; yeah, it was a a shooter, but it had a decent plot, there was character advancement, sometimes there was more than one way to solve a problem (use your guns, use psionics, or hack into a computer...). I though the environment was well done; I felt like I was in the environment they were trying to convey...
It was a little short, though; also, it did suffer at times from too much 'running around to find the key to get behind the locked door'. However, it's cheap now (if you can find it), so I'd pick it up...
You might also want to look at any of the Thief series; at least the first two were created by the same people who made System Shock 2. In a more classic vein, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 are also interesting, more from a historical view (i.e., 'wow, I didn't realize they had made this back then') but it's still a shooter/adventure hybrid.
(Okay, I like Looking Glass Studios a little too much...*grin*)
The latest Medal of Honor game (the name escapes me) seems to get good reviews, and looks like it's a more goal-oriented shooter, at least; it may be more of a shooter than what you're looking for (I miss the Black Mesa labs, too...).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe...but then again, one could argue that Shakespeare synthesized new plays from material that was available then; from what I've seen from at least some of the sources for some of his plays, there are enough differences between what Shakespeare wrote as a play, and what the sources Shakespeare probably used actually said, that Shakespeare's stuff comes across as mostly original and unique.
Music has a similar problem: yes, musicians can borrow either theme or sample from an existing work (or body of works), but generally their new syntheses of those themes and samples turn out to be different and unique from the original source(s).
I do think it's a difference in mentality between artists and OSS, but I think it's less to do with artists not having their own 'open soucre community' and more to do with them not realizing the benefits of doing things for free. :-)
Advertising, being one of the biggies: I'm sure there are more than a few 'starving' artists who would not be 'starving' if people saw their work...but, if the galleries in the artists' city don't display their work for whatever reason, what are the artists to do?
Alternatively, if those same 'starving' artists did some original artwork for a OSS game or two, their work would be more visible quicker than if they waited for some gallery to display their work. True, the artists might not hit the right audience, but they would be more likely to hit any audience...
(Besides, the artists-in-question might find they like drawing dragons and gun-toting demons more than they like drawing portraits and bowls of fruit. :-) )
Same goes for music. Yes, you aren't going to be monetarily compensated for the work created for OSS (at least, not typically); on the other hand, you get increased visibility and potentially new legions of fans and word of mouth...:-) Fair trade, I think.
And advertising's just one example; there are a lot of things you could do within a trade/barter system. Money is not the only way to pay for things; maybe an OSS game programmer/designer could offer the artist computings services (website design, e-mail account, server space, etc.) in exchange for some original artwork for the programmer's game. That stuff is useful, and doesn't come cheap. Again, I would think that's a fair trade...
OSS needs to do a better job of playing up the values of 'free as in beer'. :-)
My $0.02...
tigermonkey
Yeah, but wildly popular in terms of those who have access to the 'Net, and know where to look. How many indie games do you see sold in mainstream stores (like the big retailers) or even specialty stores (like EB or Gamestop)?
Most, if not all, of the games stocking the shelves are from established publishers, or from large corporations (primarily, Microsoft, but once upon a time, IBM did sell games); until indie games can be picked up with some frequency at some place like Target or EB, I don't think indie games will be able to assume a 'mainstream' presence, and I think this is what Mr. Crawford was talking about: making the smaller games more visible at retail level.
Using movies as an example, big studios do distribute smaller, more experimental films; there are also new studios which are willing to take a chance (IFC Films springs immediately to mind). The situation in video games is not the same: either a large publisher is publishing your game, or your game gets buried in a 'shovelware' pack.
Without a big game studio behind an indie game, I don't think the good indie games are going to get the kind of exposure that, say, an indie film or indie music group/album would get. You have whole channels devoted to promoting new, not necessarily mainstream music (MTV2 springs to mind) and new, not necessarily mainsteam film (IFC and Sundance, for example); in the gaming world, you're limited to something like G4...which will only talk to you if you're a big studio or a console developer (at least, I haven't seen a game from, say, Garage Games or Matrix Games on that channel yet). And I think there is enough of a game-playing public which doesn't log onto the Internet religiously which will miss out on the indie game scene, unless they somehow find out where to look for indie titles...
And if a big studio's PR/marketing efforts got behind some kind of clearinghouse for indie titles or some kind of collective of smaller game studios, I think that the gaming public-at-large would have a much better idea of where to start looking for indie games...as well as improving visibility on the retail level.
monkeynova
This is funny: EGM got a group of kids together and introduced them to some of the more "classic" games. End result: they weren't impressed...
On the positive side, they all agreed ET was pretty much crap; on the negative side, all the other games (with the exception of Electronic Football) were on the 'classic' list at costik.com.
http://www.egmmag.com/article2/0,4364,1338730,00 .asp
Yeah, magic in CRPGs tends to be underwhelming at best (except as buffing or fire support for your front-line fighters...).
I always liked the idea of being able to make a spell more or less difficult to cast, depending on how powerful the spell was; i.e., if you trying to do 6d of damage on a 3d spell, that would be more difficult...or if you were trying to do 1d of damage on the same 3d spell that would be less difficult. I think you can do that in GURPS; I can't think of any computer games at the moment that allow you to do this.
At least, it provides a rationale for wanting to put more points into skill with a spell: you'd want to research the spell more to make it easier to do on-the-fly substitutions in the future (making it a little easier to tackle the giant with 20d of hit dice...).
(That said, IIRC, D&D 3e allows a spell caster to do this with 'feats'; I'm not sure which of the games based on the D&D 3e ruleset allow those feats to appear in the game. D&D 3e also allows 'feats' to switch energy types when casting spells; if a spell uses fire to power it, a caster could get a 'feat' which allows that caster to substitute acid or even sound instead. I think that's a cool concept, that makes sense; the caster's learned a different version of the same spell.)
*sigh* I wish some designer would bite the bullet, and code the Ars Magica magic system; it at least assumes that a lot of the spellcasting a mage will do will be ad hoc...
Beyond Zork is an example of IF that blurs the line between RPG and text adventure, at least somewhat. You get stats, you get combat, the stats have an effect on your interactions with the story, and you get the benefits of interactive fiction: a text parser, multiple solutions to at least some of the problems you encounter in the story (at least some of which tend to be non-violent), and fairly descriptive and well-written text descriptions. I'm sure there might be others, but this game immediately springs to mind...
I agree that most IF isn't really interactive; even the interactive fiction of Infocom (maker of Beyond Zork) wasn't all that interactive. That said, would games from Looking Glass (Ultima Underworld, Thief, System Shock) qualify as IF? (I guess you could put Deus Ex in their as well; I've never played it though...) You get a graphical description of your worldview rather than a textual description, but you can have a rather significant impact on the environment through your actions...
And would they blur the line between IF and RPG? System Shock 2 allows a player a great deal of interaction with the environment, and you do have to deal with a collection of stats and skills that will have an effect on what you can or can't do in the game...
(Same can be said of Ultima Underworld; not sure about Thief...)
I think, to a large extent, you can't really compare the modern narrative structure to the structure employed in telling or playing an RPG; it is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Yes, the standard literary tools can help to advance an RPG campaign; however, one of the differences of the RPG versus a traditional narrative is that the RPG's story is not predetermined; the traditional narrative is. Also, the idea that the characters of an RPG's story will have an effect on the story is something that is foreign to most traditional narratives (storytelling to an audience may allow for some improvisation depending on the audience, but generally you don't see a lot of improvisation in the traditional narrative structure). I think the idea of a traditional narrative character advancing in a subtle, gradual way over the course of a story is something that would be difficult to achieve in all but the longest of RPG story's; changes in RPG characters need to happen fairly regularly, they need to be noticeable, and they need to take in account a often compressed timeframe for the story (whereas a traditional narrative story may take months or years to complete in the story, in a typical one-shot RPG story you're talking about days, maybe weeks).
I'm not making a value judgement about the superiority of traditional narrative vs. RPG; I'm just pointing out the difficulty in using the hallmarks of a successful story in one as a model for a successful example of the other.
I think for an RPG story to be successful there has to some form of interactivity present for the characters, especially in the form of allowing the characters to have a noticeable impact on the story. A lot of CRPG designers have taken interactivity to mean allowing a player to interact with their story in terms of combat, that may or may not have an effect on future combats in the game; as far as having an effect on the story, most player interaction tends to be superficial at best (scripted conversations being a perfect example; other than getting snippets of information if you talk to certain characters in the right order, what effect do these really have on the game?). I think most of the dissatisfaction with CRPGs stems from this disconnect: the interaction in a CRPG pales alongside the interaction potentially offered in a RPG.
(Yeah, I'm sure many of us who've played RPGs for some time have experienced the GM who thinks that either combat is the main interactive element of the story, or that player interaction is solely limited to the choices that the GM might make in terms of their story...:-) )
The designers have to put more work in to expanding the definiton of their settings to allow different players to different things (even if it is ultimately from a limited number of choices) that can have an effect on how the story will unfold. What's a little sad about all this is that the pen-and-paper RPGs have at least some component for dealing with non-combat activities in adventures; I think the designers don't tend to implement the non-combat portions, though.
(In some instances, the designers don't completely implement the combat portions of RPG engines, either. I'll use D&D as an example: D&D has a fairly extensive ruleset for psionics; I can only think of one D&D game (I believe it was a Dark Sun game) that had any kind of psionic component to it). D&D 3e has 'feats' which allow characters to bend the rules to their advantage in certain areas; I have yet to see a game based on the D&D 3e ruleset which has a full implementation of the 'feats' system. Vehicle combat isn't touched in most games, but there are rules for it. Leadership rarely comes into play in many games, even though many CRPGs have fairly large mass combats involving a lot of different allies. These are just some examples; I'm sure I've missed some.)
(Not to mention, there are other RPG engines out there, besides D&D: Storyteller, GURPS, Fuzion, FUDGE, various diceless systems, etc. Designers have tended to use either s
Seriously though, if you were making a game in which the PCs were trolls or giants or ogres, I would think cooking would be a good skill to have and develop. If nothing else, such a game should give you prestige, reputation, or experience, if you can come up with new and ingenious methods to create dishes of your enemies.
(And you have to make provisions for food preparation as well; plating is really important in RL, and I imagine that at least some giants or ogres or trolls might feel the same about their food...:-) )
An Iron Chef CRPG with Chairman Kaga as a troll...imagine the ingredient list. ;-)
What Firaxis will probably end up doing is developing sequels (Civ III) or sequel-like games (Alpha Centauri; in a lot of ways, this plays and feels like a highly polished, more flexible version of Civ II) as a means of guaranteeing a steady cash income while they develop more unique titles (Gettysburg, Antietam, SimGolf); if Pirates! allows Sid to finish his dinosaur game (the one he was working on before Civ III), I don't have a problem picking up a copy of Pirates!...*grin*
(And I would love to see an updated version of Sword of the Samurai; no it's not a Sid Meier game, but his name is in the credits, so why can't he remake it? *grin*)
tigermonkey
P.S. One wonders why Sid allowed RRII to be made by someone else; I think PopTop did a great job (I still have the game on my hard dirve, and play it every now and then), but I have to wonder what kind of financial windfall Sid would have reaped if Firaxis would have released "Sid Meyer's Railroad Tycoon II".
I like System Shock 2; yeah, it was a a shooter, but it had a decent plot, there was character advancement, sometimes there was more than one way to solve a problem (use your guns, use psionics, or hack into a computer...). I though the environment was well done; I felt like I was in the environment they were trying to convey...
It was a little short, though; also, it did suffer at times from too much 'running around to find the key to get behind the locked door'. However, it's cheap now (if you can find it), so I'd pick it up...
You might also want to look at any of the Thief series; at least the first two were created by the same people who made System Shock 2. In a more classic vein, Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 are also interesting, more from a historical view (i.e., 'wow, I didn't realize they had made this back then') but it's still a shooter/adventure hybrid.
(Okay, I like Looking Glass Studios a little too much...*grin*)
The latest Medal of Honor game (the name escapes me) seems to get good reviews, and looks like it's a more goal-oriented shooter, at least; it may be more of a shooter than what you're looking for (I miss the Black Mesa labs, too...).
tigermonkey